Anti-vaccine sentiment was laid out in 1854 when john gibbs published the booklet our medical liberties or The personal rights of the subject as infringed by recent and proposed legislation. Gibbs attacked the vaccination act of 1853 on several fronts complaining that it was an intrusion on personal rights. His complaint that vaccination benefited the medical trade may have been related to his own occupation in hydrotherapy A kind of quack medicine that involved treatment by bathing in drinking or injecting water What a giver of life and applying it to various parts of the body Given the hygiene practices of the era Promoting bathing was perhaps not the worst idea that he had but it was not an effective means of preventing smallpox